He leaves behind family, and for this I’m very sorry and hate to see what happened today. Col. Douglas Mortimer (reader) and others have exchanged mail with me on this, and while there are very mixed emotions, including my own, in my opinion there is no mortal sin. I’m not Roman Catholic. When Jesus paid it all on the cross in the vicarious atonement, that means all, sins past, present and future for His chosen people. If Bob knew Christ, he is with the savior as we speak.

Bob was an enigma wrapped inside a riddle, and I never quite knew what he was going to say or what position he was going to take. He and I butted heads on open carry and well as other things. That doesn’t diminish his life’s work, and I simply don’t take disagreements that seriously. Life is too short to lose friends over disagreements.

I don’t believe in the phrase “rest in peace” (RIP). There is work in heaven, just without the sweat of the brow. I hope Bob is working and worshipping right now.

A conservative columnist who was suspended by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after she defended the National Rifle Association from comparisons to ISIS fired back with her resignation and a series of targeted tweets.

“Her active promotional activities and professional association with the National Rifle Association represented an unacceptable conflict of interest in her most recent column, which resulted in our suspension of her work,” Tod Robberson, the Post-Dispatch’s editorial page editor, wrote in a response to Washington’s suspension and quitting.

Robberson added: “Columnists are expected to fully disclose conflicts of interest when writing about topics where such a conflict might arise. We apply this standard regardless of the lobbying or advocacy group being written about in a column.”

[ … ]

“I’m not ashamed that I’m an NRA supporter, a Bible-thumper, that I love Jesus Christ. I’m all the way out there. There’s nothing else that I can do to articulate my perspective any more clearly on where I stand.”

So let’s get this straight, “Tod.” Stacy wasn’t being paid by anyone but you. Her views are simply that – her views. You suspended her because of her views, and you know it. You’re just a cowardly liar. I have no respect for you because of that. But since you suspend people who have views, I presume you suspended all Hillary Clinton supporters from the newspaper, right? Oh, no, I see, you didn’t actually do that, did you? No, because you’re a liar.

It’s an interesting commentary, though, in that Stacy, in addition to being a charming woman and one to whom you should listen, is more of a man than you are. Good God. What kind of metrosexual, effeminate, pathetic “men” do they raise in your neck of the woods anyway?

As for Stacy, don’t worry. You’ll land on your feet and you’ll be better off without them. They suck anyway. I’ve noticed that after blogging for eleven years.

Bottom line: It wasn’t for moral reasons, like it might inspire more violence, terror and misery. The simple truth is, they got punked. The author of the article wasn’t a real leftist spouting the requisite subversive and hateful inanities. It was a setup, an intentionally outrageous submission from a fake contributor who succeeded in appealing to HuffPo’s elitist strain of privileged “progressivism” and getting the piece published in a forum that would reach the world.

Like Neil Young got owned by Lynyrd Skynyrd in “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was an answer to his “Southern Man,” the Huffington Post got owned by a fake commentary.

So read part of the commentary for yourself and decide whether Huffington Post appreciates white men: “If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened. It would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely — the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation) would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world,” it continued, adding that although “it may be unfair . . . a moratorium on the franchise for white males for a period of between 20 and 30 years is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others.”

Then, one idea I haven’t seen explored (beyond me suggesting it) is to use “the enemy’s” own tactics against him. The small “l” libertarian in me says social media giants are private enterprises, and if we don’t like the way they operate, we should go our separate ways. That does not account for the tremendous influence these corporations have on government actions and policies, which introduces coercive potential into the voluntary associations.

I think this is the best approach. It’s what I have attempted to do with Disqus comments. If readers will notice, I’ve dumped Disqus and gone back to something simpler. For a test period we had something like it with responses, but we’ve hopefully got something similar or better in the works.

Transitioning away from things like this isn’t easy. We’ve also transferred web hosts from Media Temple to another, because Media Temple had started to gouge me on prices. Why did they do that? I don’t know. I also know that my problems with Disqus left the theoretical and entered the practical when they moderated a commenter’s comment and I couldn’t approve it. It didn’t show up in the comments, but I saw it as site owner, although in Disqus there was nothing to approve. Disqus left it impossible for me to approve the comment.

I don’t use Facebook and have no account, and don’t do Twitter. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for low visits compared to similar blogs (“yea, blame it on social media rather than your own writing you putz” – the couch). Either way, until we begin to divorce ourselves from the censoring censors, they will keep censoring us.

And before I forget it, I share David’s dislike of The Firearm Blog’s claim that it’s not politics, only guns. Sure it is. I’ve seen exceptions to that rule, and they make them when it’s convenient. They ought to defenestrate the entire rule and blog on whatever they want. This is only going to get worse with time. Be prepared for more censorship with the ever increasing war on guns and traditional culture.

“Reputable.” I needn’t waste my time debunking this crap. My readers know better. Hey, what do you think Mike Vanderboegh would say about this if he was still alive? I’m smiling just thinking about it.

Three examples today convince me that it’s time for a quick update on the trolls and LARPers active among otherwise sensible (or hysterical) commenters on the internet. This redounds to disinformation, confusion, misdirection and lack of coherence among readers. That’s the intent.

The first example is generally found on Voat/Pizzagate (virtually every post now). The comments are used to flesh out truth from fiction, divide possible leads from wastes of time and effort, and to protect the investigation from embarrassment. Every post is now full of trolls, shills, detractors and naysayers. This is to be expected to some degree with false leads from time to time, but the attempted humiliation and trolling is extreme and excessive. The George Soros / David Brock CTR trolls are active, and they are paid to do this sort of thing. Note it when you find it.

Then there are the higher level shills. Some of them know a lot of information and have shared that information over various mediums. I won’t mention names here. I grant the point that some of these folks may be a “limited hang out” for us, learning what we need, then discarding the rest. But I quickly turn off the high level investigators and information purveyors when they begin to talk about closing down the networks and then letting off the higher echelon without jail time – as if there simply cannot be a way to hold all of the guilty accountable.

Listen to me very carefully. We know from FBIAnon that pedogate affects and implicates fully one third of the upper echelon of the American government. Every one of them, from members of the House, to Senators, to the wealthy, to former presidents, must be held to account. The guilty must be punished. All of them. There will be no pass issued, and if these evil men and women aren’t found out now, they will be in eternity. God never forgets. These people may not believe in God. It makes no difference. Their belief – or lack thereof – doesn’t make one iota of difference to the reality of God’s existence or the fact that He will judge the guilty. We’re coming for you. If we miss you, He is coming for you. He will not miss. Your time running out.

My comment was that one of the bills allows hunters to get silencers. That’s not something us hunters want; it will ruin the experience and allow sloppy and lazy hunters to prosper.

This commenter is no more a hunter than this computer I’m using. He’s LARPing. He’s role playing to try to send a signal to lawmakers that real “sportsmen” like him don’t want this legislation. Ridiculous. His reasons about sloppiness and laziness are concocted and fabricated our of thin air and bear no relation to any hunter I know or you know. He may be paid to LARP in the comment sections of gun articles. We cannot know for sure.

Finally, at the Small Wars Journal where the lefties hang out, Outlaw made this statement.

Islam accepts fully Judaism as it does Christianity as being “people of the book”…and surprise surprise it virtually accepts all the prophets of those two religions and hold Abraham and the Virgin Mary in high esteem

This is, of course, unmitigated horse shit, and he knows it. He also points the finger of danger at – you guessed it – white nationalists rather than jihadists in America.

… how many US armed white nationalists and or white supremacist militias are there in the US VS say how many US armed jihadist groups?

How many US based white nationalist and or white supremacist social media sites and blogsites are there currently VS US jihadists on the social media side?

How many armed confrontations in recent years in the West of the US were driven by armed white men against the Federal Government?

And yet the current WH claims jihadists are the true danger?

What about the anti Islam comments and writings by say Bannon…Miller..Flynn..and Gorka….which border on white nationalism and or white supremacy….?

Outlaw is a disinformation specialist. He is possibly being paid to undermine traditional American culture and values, but whether he is or not, he is relentless at it. In fact, he is so relentless that he isn’t even good at hiding his motives any more.

This is happening all over the internet, in all forms of communication, in all large corporations that have an HR department, throughout the MSM, and in American schools. Note it where you find it. You won’t convince people like Outlaw to see things differently or persuade him to think anything in opposition to his collectivist, open borders, globalist world view.

He is the enemy, and his stock and trade is information warfare. Focus your efforts on men of good faith who can be persuaded to think differently.

Currently this web site has around 4300 posts and over 20,000 comments. It’s still a small blog, but it pays to have some help in managing comments. Disqus has been fairly good at that, allowing for threading, response flagging via email, and upvotes. I’ve also had a fairly easy time with spamming comments and banning users. I’ve had to ban mostly David Brock type CTR shills and trolls, as well as some Bloomberg trolls who tried to hide their identity.

Recently, many passionate users have reached out to us regarding instances of hate speech across our network. Language that offends, threatens, or insults groups solely based on race, color, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or other traits is against our network terms and has no place on the Disqus network. Hate speech is the antithesis of community and an impediment to the type of intellectual discussion that we strive to facilitate.

[ … ]

Currently, we are working on improved tools to help publishers effectively prevent troublesome users from returning to their sites. And as we get smarter about identifying hate speech, we are working on ways to automatically remove it from our network.

And that means exactly what you think it means. Breitbart is taking a beating in the comments from the other snowflakes in the comments, and there is a fairly robust beatdown from Disqus users back at Disqus as well.

I simply won’t allow another party to moderate comments on my web site, especially a company who apparently joined the ranks of social justice warrior. Progressives are heavy into the tech sector, from Google to Facebook, to reddit and Disqus. Very well. I don’t have to use their product. Disqus will now find out just how good and necessary they are when they start deleting comments based on anonymous feedback and arbitrary rules. I suspect this won’t be pretty for them. Either way, it’s their problem now.

My programmer – who is my oldest son Joshua – hasn’t been able to spend much time on the site recently because he has a full time job as a professional programmer. This is the impetus we needed to work on that bucket list for the web site. I’m dumping Disqus. Look for changes in the near future.

We won’t lose any comments. He wrote his own WordPress plugin to mirror and sync comments from Disqus as soon as they were sent. I’ve noticed before the couple of times that Disqus went down that the comments were all still there, just without the framework that Disqus provides. At the time it was a curiosity to me. Now I’m truly thankful for the job he did.

I don’t need Disqus. I do make a pittance from the ads, enough to cover the cost of hosting the web site (I also don’t allow my content to be controlled by BlogSpot or any other independently owned operation, so I pay for hosting on a server of my choosing). My content is mine, and I won’t turn the keys over to anyone else (except one writer whom I had, liked very much, and who quit on me). Now, I’ll just have to foot the bill for hosting this web site out of pocket, which is between $30 – $40 per month. It used to be lower, but when they saw the traffic load and band width I used, they called and said that we needed to renegotiate the contract. So I did.

Whereas this web site was self sustaining, it will now be a net loss. But I will not allow Disqus to manage my comments in this manner. It’s a shame that it has to be this way. It has happened with so many companies it’s hard to count. Patagonia entered progressive politics, and that nice winter parka I was going to buy from them will hang on the racks.

I don’t even really care enough about Disqus to watch and see what happens to them. I used a product, and that product failed because of poor management decisions. It’s a story as old as the hills, but in this case the appurtenances has all the marks of twenty first century America.

I don’t claim to do original research on this topic, as there are good folks at Voat.co/v/pizzagate who are doing much better than I ever could, and besides, they have the right computer security to do this sort of thing – serious computer security. I don’t. But as I’ve stated, my job is to find the stuff that floats to the top, connect the dots, and then tell you about it.

This one floated to the top very, very quickly and is being heralded as the most significant find in a long time in this investigation. I’m going to repost much of the original Voat post below, and you can visit the site yourself to see the comments and any further research. There’s a lot of it. I must say how stunning it is to see the massive amount of data and information these guys and girls have processed, and the incredibly good job of analysis they’ve done.

No one at the MSM is qualified or talented enough to do this, and I doubt whether anyone at the FBI or CIA has the chops or stomach for it. The citizen researchers are doing what no one else can, and what no one else knows how to do. This is a stunning find.

We were all shocked when we found out that alleged child-trafficker James Alefantis was connected with Friends of the Orphans, the orphanage which convicted child-trafficker Laura Silsby was given children from. The Silsby case is riddled with mysteries and inconsistencies. Many questions remain unanswered, and it wasn’t until the Wikileaks emails were released that we discovered how the Clintons had intervened in the Silsby case. The question was, why? We may have found the answer to that.

According to a blog written by Robin Forestal, a staff member at NPH, Bill Clinton had planned a private visit to Friends of the Orphans, the orphanage that child-trafficker Laura Silsby was given children from, two months prior to the Earthquake. We derived this date by comparing the photo’s filenames with other documented times (filename P1180312.jpg in relation to P1180452.JPG, which was taken on Thanksgivings). Alongside a photo of Molly Hightower and Erin Kloos of Friends of the Orphans, two volunteers who died from the orphanage’s collapse during the Earthquake, Forestal wrote:

“This is Erin and Molly on their way to see Bill Clinton at one of our street schools. This is Erin and Molly afterwards – he didn’t show up.” http://i.imgur.com/JxfuLzC.pngPNG

This is evidence that Bill Clinton, who is famous for boarding the Lolita Express 26 times, is connected with Friends of the Orphans. No information is available regarding Bill Clinton’s visit to Haiti between November-December, while his last documented visit was during October. This points to the theory that Bill Clinton has personal connections with someone within Friends of the Orphans. To top it off, it was scheduled a few days prior to Thanksgivings, and a month prior to Laura Silsby’s initial visit to Haiti. Private matters?

This may explain why there was no investigation done into the orphanage in question, nor any statements made by a representative of the orphanage, and also why Laura Silsby was let off so easily. After all, as a reputable orphanage, wouldn’t you want to clear any misunderstandings? Because the spotlight was shone at Laura Silsby, the surrounding suspicions were buried. It was a Freudian slip by Jorge Puello, wanted child-trafficker who had represented Silsby as a lawyer in a Fox News interview, that revealed this connection.

Laura Silsby had attempted to traffic children twice, and was arrested on her second attempt at the Dominican border with 33 children. These 33 children had parents, and were gathered at Calabasse by pastor Jean Sainvil, who fled the country the day after Silsby was arrested. It was the first attempt where Friends of the Orphans came to play, when Silsby was caught trying to load a different group of 40 children onto the bus in Petionville, which is where the collapsed building of Friends of the Orphans was located, after a concerned citizen had reported to a police officer of suspicious activity.

The day after he met Silsby, Sainvil collected the 13 children from Citron. A day after that, the missionaries” bus was halted at the Dominican border and they were arrested. Sainvil, meanwhile, became sick with “vomiting and diarrhea” and decided to fly back to the U.S. on a military transport plane, he said. https://archive.is/iEnFk#selection-827.1-827.310

“The officer said he discovered Silsby and the nine other Americans on a bus in Port-au-Prince’s Pétionville neighborhood after receiving a tip from a concerned citizen.” https://archive.is/lMmHp

Molly Hightower, 22, was on the fifth floor of a seven-story orphanage building in Petionville when it collapsed, the organization that runs the orphanage told her father Mike Hightower of Port Orchard. https://archive.is/wcYOl

PUELLO: There was an orphanage that collapsed in Haiti. It was called friends of the orphans of Haiti. And there was somebody over there that told them that the orphans had no place, no room to place them. https://archive.fo/ox7Fa#selection-423.0-425.82

To clarify for any skeptics who believe this could have been a coincidence or a lie from Jorge Puello. Aside from the fact that there are around 760 orphanages in Haiti, the reason this cannot be a fabrication is because the name of the orphanage which Jorge Puello used was its English variant, “Friends of the Orphans”, which Puello could not have known unless he was told. This is because the orphanage is known in Haiti as Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs, which translates to “Our Little Brothers and Sisters”, and not “Friends of the Orphans”. The staff call it NPFS, and not even the signs outside of the building writes “Friends of the Orphans”. It’s simply not plausible.

Molly Mackenzie Hightower graduated from the University of Portland last year. Unlike many of her peers who chose to pursue a career post graduation, Hightower flew out to Haiti in June for a year of volunteering with Friends of the Orphans, which operates Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos/Nos Petit Freres et Soeurs (NPH/NPFS, Spanish and French for “Our Little Brothers and Sisters”) in Haiti. https://archive.is/6GIhn

What’s the point of all of this if you don’t have the time to do all of this research and reading? As stated by one commenter, here is the point.

So the Clintons had ties to the Silsby kidnapping racktet before the missionaries were arrested? You don’t say.

She only intervened because Jim Allen, a self-employed construction worker from Texas, wrote to her via his high-powered lawyers Reginald Brown and Jennifer O’Connor. The former a high-end DC lawyer at a prestigious firm, the latter a former ‘senior Clinton Administration aide’.

So instead of Silsby cs., this ordinary construction worker from Texas – not Idaho, mind – acquires the best defensive team ever assembled in an international case:

Brown says the group has assembled what he called a “dream team” for Allen that now includes Wilmer government affairs partner Benjamin Powell; Jackson Walker associate Amanda Bush and Mullin Hoard & Brown’s Jeffrey Ritter in Amarillo; Liberty Legal’s Hiram Sasser; and local counsel Louis Gary Lissade in Port au Prince. (Lissade is a former minister of justice and two-time president of the Haitian Bar Association; Bush is married to former President George W. Bush’s eldest nephew, George P. Bush; and Powell is the former general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence under Presidents Bush and Obama.)

Indeed. A whole lot of high powered people got very spun up over some child trafficker who wasn’t anything to anyone, yes? ZeroHedge posted on this very topic today. But she was someone to someone, in fact, someone who is “special.”

In this post, the researchers have quite literally tracked down where the children came from, and performed the counting necessary to understand where she got her children in Haiti.

The MSM continues to beclown itself following the size of the inauguration crowds, what folks were wearing that day, and how everyone was looking at everyone else. By God – look at that facial expression! Meanwhile, people who are honest and capable are doing the job the MSM won’t do.

They should shut down every journalism school in America and restart the schools with these researchers leading them. At least then we could be assured that something good would actually come out of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has perished in America except for people who are not being paid to do it.

It’s difficult to be patient. It’s hard to wait and let stories develop. It’s hard work to investigate and vet sources. But just occasionally it’s both gratifying and amusing to be a part of things like this, albeit small on my part.

Watching the developments over the last couple of days brought a smile to my face and made me glad to be alive and able to appreciate what I’ve seen. The MSM has absolutely self destructed, little progressive heads have exploded all over the place, and it’s wonderful to sit back and observe the festivities over something so allegedly fake and fabricated as #Pizzagate.

But first things first. This began months ago when a journalist named Ben Swann began studying #Pizzagate, I’m sure using the sources found by the citizen investigators. He did a fairly short presentation for CBS46 in Atlanta on Pizzagate. By my estimation it was fairly benign and moderate, but he was certainly honest and careful. It was a good piece of investigative journalism making use of the discoveries by the citizen investigators. Here it is.

Queue the fireworks and exploding progressive heads. It was the first MSM piece that didn’t claim to “debunk” Pizzagate, but rather, gave it an honest hearing. That cannot be allowed among the rank and file. The attacks started and will continue for some time I’m sure.

Further, Ben Swann articles were scrubbed from reddit, and the most interesting thing of all is that we’ve learned that CBS46 took down their post of the video. Here is a phone call where they admit it.

A “URL problem.” This is priceless. Above I said that the hit pieces were crafted like Ben Swann had ended journalism as they all know it. Of course, that isn’t what happened. That occurred long before now at the hands of the MSM. No one cares about them anymore, so their own “get thee to thy fainting couch” reactions over their lost credibility are wasted effort.

But ironically, if it’s ever to be rebuilt, it will have to be with people like Ben Swann. Let me interpret for you what’s happened. There are those true believers in the “big state,” those “journalists” who believe that the government can do no wrong, who believe that the progressives have the correct vision for the world and that a monopoly of force should and must be used to enforce that vision. They will never believe that anything nefarious could occur. The state is righteous by definition.

This is a point of interest for my oldest son, Joshua, who quips from time to time about how the old conservatives and liberals have swapped places. Not the neo-cons, many of whom are in bed with the progressives, but the conservatives like me – those who believe that government must have checks and balances and that the best government is the smallest and least intrusive government.

I’m not so sure that we’ve actually swapped places like he thinks, as the hippie movement always had statism at its core, it was just that they weren’t in power and others were. Besides, neocons aren’t really conservatives anyway. What we’re watching now is the logical consequence and necessary outcome of the Bohemian flower child generation. These are the children of the hippies, both literally and ideologically.

But there is a second category of “journalists” who lament Ben Swann’s presentation, and they’re are the most interesting to me. Years ago when my son Daniel was in the Marines and I was a military blogger, I wrote a story on their operations entirely from email communications with Lt. Col. William Mullen (now Brigadier General). I couldn’t do it any other way. I tried to go to Iraq and report on his battalion, but I started too late and the funds weren’t there. I added some of what I knew without my conversations with Mullen, and it turned into a decent article. Not great, perhaps not even really good, but decent. Decent enough to publish, and that’s about it.

A friend named Bill Ardolino, who was a legitimate combat reporter, wrote me with both congratulations and lamentations. He liked the piece and congratulated me for getting the story. He lamented the fact that he considered it “his story” that I scooped. Half jokingly, but still, I could tell that he had wanted to write what I had written.

Bill went on to write a much better report from Fallujah in 2007 than I did, so I didn’t really scoop him. But here’s the thing. Ben Swann really did scoop the rest of the MSM put together. They are rattling their cages, chomping at the bits, barking at the walkers, or however you want to put it, waiting for the government – there’s that notion again of government omniscience – to tell them it’s okay to write about it because charges are coming down, or investigations are underway, or court dates have been set.

The editors are holding them back. Investigative journalism is over in America. All of the moral preening in the “journalism” community, all of the pining away for how things used to be, all of the time spent in journalism classrooms, is all just so much flotsam and jetsam. It’s just all irrelevant, and no one outside of their little circle of self righteous watchers cares. The watchers have turned into talking heads and pundits who interpret official talking points for the masses, nothing more.

Citizen investigators are beating everyone to the punch, and we finally see a courageous journalist who dares to go out and speak truth to power, and lo and behold, it’s not his detractors who did the piece. Outrage! Ben got their scoop, and they’re pissed about it. He was first out of the gate, and so he must be censored, even by his own station.

The MSM sucks, and it doesn’t just suck, but it sucks really, really badly. It’s worse than totally worthless. It has a deleterious affect on the culture. I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it – not just conservatives, but everyone. If fake news is a problem, it begins and ends with the MSM. I’m not sure it’s possible for the collective community to recover, but if it stands any chance, doing what they did to Ben Swann is diametrically opposed to what they should be doing. Their instincts are so bad I’m disinclined to believe that they can ever recover.